A video encoder compresses video information so that more information can be sent over a given bandwidth. The compressed signal may then be transmitted to a receiver having a decoder that decodes or decompresses the signal prior to display.
High Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest video compression standard, which is being developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) formed by ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). Similar to previous video coding standards, HEVC includes basic functional modules such as intra/inter prediction, transform, quantization, in-loop filtering, and entropy coding. HEVC codec processes and compresses a picture by partitioning it into multiple non-overlapped blocks, which are denoted as coding units (CUs). A coding unit contains a square block of luma pixels and two corresponding blocks of chroma pixels. The size of a coding unit can be configured to be 8×8, 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64 in luma component.
Based on the HEVC standard, the study of Three Dimensional Video Coding extension of HEVC (3D-HEVC) is currently on-going by the Joint Collaborative Team on 3D Video Coding (JCT-3V) formed by ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). In 3D-HEVC, multiview video plus depth (MVD) coding concept is used to represent the 3D video content, in which a limited number of texture views and associated depth maps are coded and multiplexed into a bitstream.